What Is AI Marketing And How To Incorporate It In Your Marketing Strategy
Time to read: 5 minutes
What is AI marketing?
AI Marketing, also known as Artificial Intelligence Marketing, harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to automate decision-making processes in marketing. It involves utilising AI technologies to collect and analyse data, as well as observe audience behaviour and economic trends that impact marketing initiatives. Particularly in digital marketing, where speed is crucial, AI is employed to streamline efforts.
AI marketing tools leverage data and customer profiles to understand the most effective ways to engage with customers. These tools autonomously deliver customised messages to individuals at the opportune moment, without requiring intervention from marketing team members. This ensures optimal efficiency in marketing campaigns. AI is commonly employed by digital marketers to enhance their teams or handle tasks that demand less human involvement.
AI Marketing encompasses various use cases, including:
1. Data Analysis: Automating the collection and analysis of large volumes of marketing data from different campaigns and programs, eliminating the need for manual sorting.
2. Content Generation: AI generates both short and long-form content for marketing purposes, including video captions, email subject lines, web copy, blogs, and more’.
3. Media Buying: Predicting the most effective advertisement and media placements for a business, maximising the return on investment (ROI) of marketing strategies while reaching the target audience.
4. Real-time Personalisation: Modifying a customer's experience with marketing assets, such as web pages, social media posts, or emails, to align with their past preferences and encourage specific actions, such as clicking a link, signing up, or making a purchase.
5. Natural Language Processing (NLP): Utilising AI to generate human-like language for content creation, customer service bots, personalised experiences, and more.
6. Automated Decision-Making: Assisting businesses in deciding which marketing or business growth strategies to employ based on historical data or external data inputs.
How does AI marketing work?
AI Marketing works by empowering modern marketers to gain a comprehensive and insightful understanding of their audience. With the advent of AI platforms, marketers and organisations can extract valuable customer insights from a diverse range of data sources. These insights serve to deepen customer connections, foster genuine engagement, and drive higher conversion rates.
AI plays a vital role in various aspects of marketing, including:
1. Marketing Automation: AI is utilised to automate tasks such as lead generation, lead scoring, and customer retention. By leveraging AI, marketers can identify potential customers and engage with them at the optimal time when they are most likely to respond positively to marketing messages.
2. Personalisation: AI technologies create customer profiles based on data gathered from their purchase history and interactions. Marketers can then deliver targeted advertisements, offers, and new products that align with customers' preferences. Targeted marketing, powered by customer data, enhances engagement, conversion rates, and overall marketing return on investment (ROI).
3. Forecasting: AI serves as a valuable tool for predictive analytics and forecasting. Predictive analytics utilises data from past customer interactions to anticipate their future actions. When applied to larger audience segments and scaled up, AI can also forecast business metrics such as revenue outcomes, providing valuable insights for strategic decision-making.
Types of AI marketing solutions
AI marketing solutions play a crucial role in enabling marketers to establish connections with consumers. The following components make up the leading solutions today, bridging the gap between the vast amount of customer data and actionable steps for future campaigns:
1. Machine Learning:
Machine learning, driven by AI, utilises computer algorithms to automatically analyse information and enhance digital marketing campaigns based on experience. By leveraging relevant historical data, machine learning devices can inform marketers about effective strategies and help avoid repeating past mistakes.
2. Big Data and Analytics:
The rise of digital media has generated a significant amount of "big data," presenting opportunities for marketers to gain insights and accurately assess value across different channels. However, the abundance of data can be overwhelming. AI marketing comes to the rescue by rapidly sifting through the data, filtering it down to its essentials, and providing analysis. It can also recommend the most valuable elements to incorporate into future marketing campaigns.
3. AI Marketing Platforms & Tools:
Effective AI-powered marketing solutions offer digital marketers centralised platforms for managing the vast amounts of collected data. These AI marketing platforms extract valuable marketing intelligence from the target audience, empowering marketers to make data-driven decisions about effective outreach strategies. For instance, frameworks like Bayesian Learning and Forgetting aid marketers in understanding a customer's receptiveness to specific digital marketing efforts, leading to improved campaign targeting.
In summary, AI marketing solutions encompass machine learning for campaign improvement, the use of big data and analytics for insightful analysis, and AI-powered platforms and tools for managing data and making informed marketing decisions.
How is AI changing digital marketing?
AI is changing digital marketing in several ways, bringing significant advancements to the industry. Here are some key ways in which AI is transforming digital marketing:
1. Centralised Data: AI-enhanced marketing automation can gather, organise, analyse, and segment valuable marketing data from multiple sources. This automation not only saves time, but also improves data accuracy and accessibility, providing marketers with a centralised location for data storage and utilisation in marketing campaigns.
2. Improved A/B Testing: AI algorithms enable faster and more comprehensive A/B testing. From web copy to design elements, AI can run campaigns through algorithms, learning and improving with each iteration. This enhances the efficiency of testing and provides marketers with more insightful results to optimise their marketing strategies.
3. Virtual Agents: AI-powered virtual assistants, such as chatbots, offer around-the-clock customer support. These virtual agents leverage user data to inform sales and advertising efforts, freeing up human agents for more complex tasks. They enhance the customer experience by providing self-serve ways for consumers to find information and make informed purchasing decisions.
4. Targeted Lead Generation and Client Segmentation: AI utilises big data to build robust profiles for leads, cross-referencing social media trends, web interactions, and public records. This enables targeted lead generation and personalised marketing messages, predicting conversion likelihood and executing follow-up actions, thus optimising lead qualification and nurturing.
5. Content Creation Written by AI: AI-powered natural language processing and machine learning enable the creation of marketing content and interpretation of user reactions. While AI cannot replicate the creativity of human writers, it can generate personalised content suggestions, ad copy, subject headlines, and calls to action, augmenting the content creation process.
6. Timely Messaging: AI analyses client preferences and behaviours to determine the best time to deliver marketing messages. By sending messages when clients are most receptive, AI helps optimise campaign ROI and ensures timely and relevant interactions with customers.
7. Self-Learning: AI systems are designed to continuously learn and improve over time, mimicking intelligent processes. Through self-teaching and cognitive capabilities, AI becomes more accurate and beneficial as it is utilised, allowing marketers to leverage its evolving intelligence to automate and optimise marketing operations.
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The benefits of using AI in marketing in your business
Utilising AI in marketing is a great way to leverage those technologies that allow us to develop deeper customer insights across a whole range of touchpoints:
Gather data-rich insights in a fraction of the time
AI also plays a pivotal role in data analytics and performance measurement. AI enables marketers to track campaign performance from mass-market messaging right down to individual social media posts. With the power of AI, marketers can leverage thousands of data points to optimise their measurement framework according to the targets and metrics that matter to the business.
Understand your target audience better
The data collected by AI can help provide us with a better understanding of our customers by collecting and analysing their social, behavioural and sales data so you can target your message to the right audience and better anticipate their needs.
Streamline operations
Data drives modern marketing practices and AI plays a central role in achieving better business efficiencies and delivering better outcomes across marketing operations. AI can help streamline marketing operations as it will minimise the inefficiencies in your business’ operations allowing for more time to be spent on strategic action.
The Challenges of AI Marketing
Training employees
Data quality
User data security and privacy
Employee adoption
Developing best practices
How to use AI marketing
Establish Clear Goals
Adhere to Data Privacy Standards
Consider Data Quantity and Sources
Acquire Data Science Talent
Ensure Data Quality
As machine learning and AI marketing programs rely on data, it is crucial to maintain high data quality. If the data fed into your AI marketing program is not standardised and error-free, the insights derived may be unreliable and potentially lead to detrimental decisions. Before implementing AI marketing programs, marketing teams should collaborate with data management teams and other departments to establish processes for data cleansing and maintenance. Consider the following essential data dimensions:
Timeliness
Completeness
Consistency
Relevance
Transparency
Accuracy
Representativeness
Develop an Integrated AI Marketing Strategy
How can you best implement AI?
Utilising AI in marketing doesn’t come without challenges. Although AI technologies are becoming more common across many marketing practices, some important considerations should be accounted for.
Being mindful of these key rules to AI will help you be prepared and avoid any potential pitfalls:
Accurate data is a must
AI requires accurate, verifiable data inputs to make effective marketing initiatives. Low quality or incomplete data can cause more issues than no data so avoid inputting poor data at all costs.
Invest in quality AI technology
Successfully integrating AI into your marketing technology and services platform requires the appropriate technology resources. Investing in a quality AI system will ensure the adoption of the technology runs smoothly, where a cheaper system may break down. Organisations that struggle to fully invest in the hardware can opt to partner with a cloud provider who can help guide them with the right technology solutions.
Creating a technology adoption culture
Organisations that fully embrace the opportunities that come through building AI into their marketing operations will be in a strong position to make the most of the competitive advantage that AI can deliver. Develop this culture by providing training and support programs to help people understand how to best use the technology and understand what can be achieved with the new technology.